Manitoba byelections matter, but not merely in terms of who wins
Bartley Kives | CBC News | Posted: June 18, 2023 11:00 AM | Last Updated: June 18, 2023
The size of Conservative, Liberal victory margins in 2 ridings may influence tactics in next general election
There's a lot at stake for the federal Conservatives and Liberals when voters in two Manitoba ridings choose new MPs on Monday.
That's not because any seats are expected to change hands. Instead, both parties will be looking for signs of strength and weakness heading into the back stretch of the Liberal minority government's latest term.
In Winnipeg South Centre, a riding that selected a Liberal MP in 10 out of the past 11 federal elections, anything less than a convincing victory by Liberal candidate Ben Carr could be seen as a sign voters in traditional Liberal strongholds are growing tired of Justin Trudeau's minority government.
Ben Carr is the son of the late Liberal cabinet minister Jim Carr, who died in December. The party is counting on the younger Carr to claim his father's old seat by a margin large enough to quiet any internal party whispers about Trudeau's fitness to compete in another general election.
On the basis of voting history, Carr's most formidable opponent ought to be Conservative Damir Stipanovic. His party is the only political entity other than the Liberals to win the seat since it was reconstituted in 1988.
The Conservatives won Winnipeg South Centre when former school trustee Joyce Bateman wrested the seat away from former school trustee Anita Neville in 2011 and sat as a member of Stephen Harper's majority government.
Going into this Winnipeg South Centre race, the Conservatives have an opportunity. Trudeau is less popular than he used to be and as a result, some Liberal voters may not be motivated to vote in an early-summer byelection.
Nonetheless, both Conservative and Liberal campaign sources confirm the party on the right has directed fewer resources to Winnipeg South Centre than it has to Portage-Lisgar, the site of another byelection the Conservatives are all but certain to win.
In Portage-Lisgar, Conservative candidate Branden Leslie is up against former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, now the leader of the People's Party of Canada.
In the 2021 federal election, Conservative Candice Bergen trounced her PPC competition by 31 percentage points. Yet this remained one of the only seats in Canada where Bernier's party finished in second place.
The Conservatives appear to be hell-bent on trying to whittle down the PPC share of the popular vote in Portage-Lisgar to the teens or single digits.
The ultimate goal is to dishearten Bernier to the point where the People's Party is wiped off the electoral map, a development that would accomplish two objectives for the Conservatives in the next federal election.
One is straightforward: The Conservatives covet the 841,000 votes amassed by the PPC across the country in 2021. Conservatives tend to consider those votes rightly theirs and regard them as stolen away by a politician they view as a heretic.
The second objective is more tactical. Without the PPC hovering over Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's right flank, the party could campaign closer to the centre in the next general election.
While no one is suggesting Poilievre is preparing to become the second coming of Erin O'Toole and start skating straight up the centre of the ice, the Conservatives don't stand to make easy inroads into suburban Toronto ridings without at least some moderation of what is right now a very hard-right-populist party image.
This appears to be why former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer and Poilievre himself have visited Portage-Lisgar during this byelection campaign. The Conservatives want rural Manitoba to be completely blue again, without any purple discoloration.
How well that's going is unclear. According to an automated telephone poll of 362 Portage-Lisgar adults conducted on June 13 and 14 by Mainstreet Research, Conservative candidate Leslie has a commanding lead among decided voters, with 41 per cent of the vote.
Bernier is a distant second, the poll suggests, but still commands 26 per cent support. If that result holds on election day, it would be an improvement for the Quebec politician campaigning in rural Manitoba.
Mainstreet said its poll has a 5.2 per cent error margin, with 95 per cent certainty. Yet caution must be exercised in interpreting this set of numbers, as robocall-style polls tend to be less accurate than polls based on more rigorously collected samples.
In this case, only 74 of Mainstreet's 362 participants were under the age of 50. This might skew results to the point where candidates favoured by older voters are favoured more than they are in the riding overall.
Still, the idea Maxime Bernier could come out of this byelection emboldened would not be welcome news for the Conservatives.
That, in turn, would be welcome news for the Liberals.